The Thief ib-5 Read online

  * * *

  “He’s wrong,” Marion said fiercely when Bell reported back to the Abbott town house on how they were rebuffed. “Tarses is so busy trying to stay a step ahead of the sheriff, he doesn’t understand. I’m so sorry, I thought he was smarter than that. Isaac, this is so important, we must help Clyde.”

  “Who else can we approach?”

  “I wonder…”

  Bell waited. They were in Archie’s library. From the drawing room came the sounds of a dinner party gathering for cocktails. “Why don’t you get dressed?” said Marion. “Let me think on this.”

  When Bell returned in a midnight blue dinner jacket, Marion was fired up and supremely confident. “There is an innovative director at the Biograph Company — bold and very clever.”

  “But Biograph is part of the Trust.”

  “He’s chafing under company rule. He wants to make his own pictures. He’s so forward-thinking — he’s invented all sorts of wonderful tricks with the camera — he might realize the potential of Clyde’s machine.”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  “He just took fifty people to California. He’s making a Biograph picture in some little village outside Los Angeles.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Griffith. You’ve seen his pictures. D. W. Griffth.”

  “Of course! He made Is This Seat Taken?”

  “He’s your man.”

  Isaac Bell said, “I hate to leave you so soon after our wedding, but I had better take Clyde to see him.”

  Marion said, “I would love to visit my father in San Francisco and tell him all about the wedding.”

  “Wonderful! ’Frisco’s only five hours on the train. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  Marion straightened his bow tie and pressed close. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could travel together to California?”

  Bell shook his head with a rueful smile. “I wish we could.”

  “I love riding trains with you.” She laughed. “Now that we’re married, we don’t have to book two staterooms for propriety’s sake.”

  “Unfortunately, escorting Clyde, I’m obliged to double up with him to keep a close watch.”

  “Do you expect Krieg to try to kidnap him?”

  “No, no, no. Just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, after we meet Mr. Griffith, I’ll stash Clyde with the Los Angeles office for a weekend, and you and I can rendezvous in Santa Barbara.”

  “And after I’ve seen my father, I’ll come down to Los Angeles to find some work.”

  * * *

  The old Grand Central Station was no more. Its classical facade and its six-hundred-and-fifty-foot glass train shed had just been razed, and now steam shovels and hard-rock miners were burrowing sixty feet into the Manhattan schist to make room for a new, two-level Grand Central Terminal.

  Isaac Bell led Clyde Lynds into a temporary station that was operating out of the Grand Central Palace, a convention and trade fair building around the corner on Lexington Avenue, and headed for the makeshift gate marked “20th Century Limited.” The chaos of new construction had not persuaded the crack Chicago-bound express to lower its standards. Temporary or not, its famous red carpet had been rolled out the length of the platform.

  “Hang on a minute,” said Bell. “Loose shoelace.” He planted his foot on a fire department standpipe protruding from a wall and busied his hands around his boot.

  “How can you have a loose shoelace?” asked Clyde. “Your boots don’t have laces.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.” Bell straightened up and headed for the telephones. “I have to phone the office. Stick close.”

  “I heard there’s a phone on the train.”

  “There will be a line of businessmen waiting to telephone their offices that they didn’t miss the train. Stick close.”

  Bell told the operator at the front desk, “Van Dorn Agency, Knickerbocker Hotel,” and followed the attendant to a paneled booth. When the Van Dorn operator answered, he asked for the duty man.

  “This is Chief Investigator Bell. Two tall yellow-haired men in dark suits and derbies followed me across Forty-second Street and into the Grand Central Palace. They’re hanging around the waiting room pretending not to watch the Twentieth Century gate. One has a mustache and is wearing a green four-in-hand necktie. The other is clean-shaven, with a dark bow tie. I’ll telephone again when we change locomotives at Harmon.”

  Bell paid the attendant.

  “Let’s go buy some magazines, Clyde— No, don’t look in their direction.”

  21

  Forty-five minutes after leaving New York, the 20th Century Limited stopped in Harmon to exchange the electric engine that had hauled it out of the Manhattan tunnels for a high-wheeled 4-4-2 Atlantic steamer that would rocket it north to Albany at seventy-five miles an hour. While train and yard crews swiftly uncoupled the old and coupled the new, Isaac Bell ran to the New York Central dispatcher’s office, identified himself as a Van Dorn detective, and asked to use their telephone.

  The duty man at the Knickerbocker reported that Van Dorn operatives were trailing the “gentlemen thugs” who had followed Bell across 42nd Street.

  A wire waiting for Bell at Albany, where the flyer got a fresh locomotive and a dining car, reported laconically,

  NOTHING YET.

  After dinner, there was nothing at Syracuse.

  Bell had booked a stateroom with two narrow berths. He stretched out on the bottom berth, fully clothed.

  Clyde said, “You know I could have saved money sleeping in a Pullman berth.”

  “I assure you, Clyde, you would not be my first choice of company for a night on an express train, but this way I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Who were those men? Krieg?”

  “I should know for sure by morning.”

  “How would they know to follow us from your detective agency?”

  “They followed us from the hotel, not the agency.” Bell had stashed Clyde for safekeeping in a room at the Knickerbocker next door to the Van Dorn bull pen. The hotel was enormous, and the Krieg agents would have no reason to connect Clyde to Van Dorn.

  “How’d they know what hotel?”

  “They probably followed us to the Knickerbocker from Edison’s laboratory. I believe you did mention Thomas Edison while discussing your machine with Krieg?”

  “Sure. I wanted Krieg to know there were others we could go to.”

  “You can bet they’ve been watching the Edison laboratory since the Mauretania landed, waiting for you to show up.”

  Bell locked the door and closed his eyes, recalling nights on the 20th Century when he and Marion would drink champagne in the privacy of adjoining staterooms.

  At Rochester, the telegraph delivered pay dirt.

  GTS TO ATTACHE AT GC.

  Isaac Bell broke into a lupine smile.

  Translated, the wire read that the “gentleman thugs” who had followed him to the train had reported to a diplomatic attaché whom the Van Dorn detectives covering the Bowling Green Office Building had already identified at the German consulate. In other words, Krieg and the German Army knew that he and Clyde were steaming to Chicago. But they did not know that Bell knew.

  He wired the Chicago field office from the next engine stop.

  * * *

  The “drummers’s table” in the breakfast room at the exclusive Palmer House Hotel in Chicago was like a private club, but any traveling salesman who could afford the best hotel in town was welcome to sit in. The club brothers — valuable men who worked on commission only and paid their own expenses — had expensive suits, florid complexions, and proud bellies, and they laughed louder and told newer jokes than the founders of steel and slaughterhouse fortunes at the surrounding tables.

  The top salesman for the Locomobile Company of America was telling a new story he had heard two days earlier at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, front office involving accidentally switched department store deliveries of ladies’ gloves and und
ergarments.

  The representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company interrupted. “Hey, here’s Fritz!”

  “Hello, Fritz! Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”

  Men shuffled around to make room for the new arrival, a broad-shouldered, light-on-his feet German in his mid-thirties who traveled America peddling church organs and parlor pianos.

  “Waiter! Waiter! Breakfast for Mr. Wunderlich.”

  “Only time for coffee. I’m catching the train for Los Angeles.”

  Fritz Wunderlich was a funny-looking fellow, with heavy brow ridges, a mighty anvil of a jaw, and long arms like a gorilla, but he had a smile that any drummer would give his eye-teeth for. It opened wide as the prairie and bright as the sun and pulled the customers in like suction from a sinking ship.

  Fritz worked hard as a nailer—“Eight days in the week, thirteen months in the year”—and it paid off, judging by the cut of his funereal black suit, his immaculate linen, his fine homburg, his weighty gold watch chain, and the ten-cent polish on his shoes.

  “Coffee for Fritz!”

  “Mit schlag!”

  “Hear that, waiter? Mit schlag.”

  “Vat is the story I interrupt?”

  The Locomobile drummer started over again, repeating the beginning about the mixed-up ladies’ gloves and undergarments. “So then the lady who received the panties gets a letter from the fellow who sent her his gift of gloves. Here’s what he wrote.”

  Fritz broke in with the last line of the joke: “Whoever sees you in these vill admire my good taste and your delicate looks!”

  The table roared with laughter and choruses of “That’s a good one!”

  “But it’s a brand-new joke,” protested the drummer from Bridgeport. “How’d you hear it? I came direct to Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited.”

  “I heard it in ’Frisco last veek,” said Fritz.

  “’Frisco? How? Did anyone else at the table ever hear it before?”

  Salesmen shook their heads. “New to me, Jake.”

  The youngest, a Chicago hometown fellow making big money on a line from the Gillette Safety Razor Company, had the explanation: “Electricity is faster than steam.”

  “What the heck do you mean by that?” asked the Locomobile representative.

  “He means,” said Fritz Wunderlich, “vile you ride the train, your joke flies to San Francisco on the telegraph vire.”

  “Who can afford to telegraph jokes?”

  “No one goes to the expense. But late at night when the wires are quiet and the operators have nothing else to do, they click jokes to one another.”

  The Quaker Oats salesman nodded. “They know their pals by their ‘fists.’ One pal clicks another, city to city, and the jokes get passed along the wire all the way across the continent.”

  “Fritz? How are things in Leipzig?”

  “I am happy to say that America remains a nation of God-fearing, music-loving churchgoers, so things in Leipzig are very vell indeed. At least among the organ builders, danke. Und you, gentlemen? All are vell?”

  “Very well, Fritz. Say, weren’t you trying to sell a new organ to that big church in St. Louis last time? How did that go?”

  “Detroit, if I recall. And thank you, it vent O.K.”

  “They bought the new organ?”

  “Two!”

  “Two organs for one church? Why did they buy two?”

  Wunderlich’s smile warmed the table, and his response was the drummer’s anthem: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The table roared. Salesmen slapped their thighs. Those indulging in eye-openers signaled the waiters for another round.

  “Must go. Time is money. Ja! I almost forget. I took on a new line. Hymnals. Here, sample pages.” He opened a calfskin satchel decorated in solid brass and passed around beautifully printed single sheets.

  “Onvard, Christian Soldiers,” he sang as he bundled up his things. His beautiful voice, a thrilling lyric tenor, stopped every conversation in the room. “Marching as to Var.”

  The drummers took up the hymn, beating time with coffee cups and highball glasses and waving farewell to good old Fritz, who was running to catch his train.

  “That is one tip-top traveling man,” said the Locomobile representative loud enough for Fritz to hear.

  “‘Eight days in the veek,’” chuckled another as the German disappeared out the door. “‘Thirteen months in the year.’”

  “‘Time is money!’”

  “‘Mit schlag.’”

  “Funny thing, though,” said the Gillette Razor man.

  “What’s that?”

  “I stopped in one of his firms’ piano shops in Akron. They said they couldn’t take any orders, they was all backed up.”

  “You heard Fritz. Business is booming.”

  “Yeah, except it weren’t the kind of shop you’d think. Dusty old place. Surly fella behind the desk looked more like the ‘floor manager’ in a saloon than a piano salesman. Hard to believe anybody ever bought anything there.”

  “Maybe you just stopped by on a bad day.”

  “Suppose.”

  * * *

  General Major Christian Semmler, Imperial German Army, Division of Military Intelligence, hurried out of the Palmer House, basking in the drummers’ laughter and their warm farewells. As a child in the circus Semmler had learned from the clowns that an actor who inhabited an alias would never be caught out of character.

  There was a “Drummers’ Table” in every fine hotel in America. In this club, “Fritz Wunderlich,” commission salesman of organs and pianos, was a brother.

  “Fritz Wunderlich” could travel where he pleased.

  Christian Semmler, mastermind of the Donar Plan, never had to explain himself.

  22

  Isaac Bell and Clyde Lynds changed trains at Chicago to continue across the continent on the Rock Island’s all-Pullman Golden State Limited to Los Angeles. Van Dorn detectives shadowed them so discreetly from the 20th Century’s LaSalle Street Station to the Golden State’s Dearborn Station that even Bell only spotted them twice.

  Once aboard the Golden State, he asked a Van Dorn agent costumed as a conductor if they’d been followed. He was assured, categorically, no. Bell figured it was quite likely true. Joseph Van Dorn had founded the agency in Chicago. The detectives headquartered in the Palmer House were top-notch and proud of it.

  * * *

  The Golden State Limited was a transcontinental express that would stop only at major stations along a 2,400-mile run south and west on the low-altitude El Paso Route. A luxurious “heavyweight,” it consisted of a drawing room sleeper, a stateroom and drawing room sleeper, a stateroom car of smaller cabins — where Bell had again booked top and bottom berths — the dining car, and a buffet-library-observation car in the back of the train. Mail, baggage, and express cars rode at the front end directly behind the tender that carried coal and water for the Pacific 4-6-2 locomotive.

  Five minutes before its scheduled departure from Chicago, a slab-sided Bellamore Armored Steel Bank Car bearing the name of the Continental & Commercial National Bank rumbled on solid rubber tires into the Dearborn Station’s train shed. It stopped beside the Golden State. Shotgun-toting guards unloaded an oversized strongbox into the express car.

  The strongbox, as long as a coffin, was addressed to the Los Angeles Trust and Savings Bank at 561 South Spring Street. The destination, and the closemouthed guards who wrestled it into the express car, guaranteed that it was packed with gold, negotiable bearer bonds, banknotes, or a strikingly valuable combination of all three. A friendly remark by the express car messenger, that when he was recently in Los Angeles the bank’s building on South Spring Street was still under construction, was met with cold stares and a curt “Sign here.”

  The express messenger, Pete Stock, a cool customer with a well-oiled Smith & Wesson on his hip, was nearing retirement with every expectation of receiving a fine Waltham watch for brave service to the co
mpany. Having guarded innumerable shipments of specie, paper money, and ingots of silver and gold — and having shot it out more than once with gunmen intending to “transact business with the express car”—he checked carefully that the paperwork the brusque Bellamore guard handed him tallied with his manifest, and then he signed.

  * * *

  Isaac Bell sent and received telegrams at every station stop.

  At Kansas City, Kansas, a wire from Marion, who never wasted money on telegraphed words, read:

  GRIFFITH AWAITS CLYDE.

  BRIDE MISSES GROOM.

  Griffith, similarly parsimonious as well as courteous, wired:

  EXPECTANT.

  Pondering the Acrobat, Bell wired Harry Warren in New York:

  MISSED A BET? BRUNO DIDN’T

  TELL BROTHER FRANK WHO HIRED

  HIM. BUT DID BRUNO TELL HIS GIRLFRIEND?

  Harry Warren’s response caught up with Bell the next night. The train was taking on an additional “helper” locomotive to climb the mountains, seventy miles east of the Arizona Territory border at Deming, New Mexico Territory.

  BRUNO TOLD GIRLFRIEND OF COAL STOKER LIKE APE.

  SOUND FAMILIAR?

  Familiar. And odd. The same man seemed to be everywhere, and it occurred to Isaac Bell that the Acrobat was an unusually deadly type rarely encountered in the underworld — a criminal mastermind who did his own dirty work. Whether outlaw or foreign spy, lone operators were elusive, being immune to betrayal by inept subordinates.

  Bell chewed on this while he watched a precision rail-yard ballet performed by the Deming brakemen coupling on the helper. A thought struck him like a bolt of lightning. Despite the military precision of the Acrobat’s attack that had almost succeeded in kidnapping Lynds and Beiderbecke off the Mauretania, if he was a soldier, the Acrobat was no ordinary soldier.